Curt Malawsky has made it clear that accountability is to be as much a byword for the 2013 Calgary Roughnecks’ season as offence and defence.

“The guys understand what we expect from a coaching perspective,” pointed out Calgary’s rookie head coach during the National Lacrosse League’s weekly conference call.

“They let the team down. It wasn’t so much us as coaches; they let their teammates down. The penalties that we took were at inopportune times. I’m very confident in our group. We have a character bunch of guys. They know that when something is said it’s going to get done from the coaching side so they know the ramifications. We’re putting the trust that they’ll learn from their mistakes and we’ll get better every week, put this one behind us and move forward.”

Suffice to say, Malawsky is looking for a stronger overall effort by his charges on Saturday, when the Colorado Mammoth come calling at the Scotiabank Saddledome at 7 p.m. Calgary dropped its opener 13-11 to the Toronto Rock, with penalties and a dismal transition game two of the major culprits.

“We were eager to see what we could do and this showed our guys we have a lot of work to do,” said Malawsky, in review of that loss. “From a discipline standpoint, we’ve had that issue the last three years and it carried over to the first game. The message is loud and clear that the guys will be losing some minutes and losing some game time if they continue to follow through on the discipline side of it.

“On the technical side, Toronto ran on us. We really pushed our transition in camp and we didn’t have a lot of transition. We turned two-on-ones into three-on-ones and four-on-ones. For the most part, we are a young group, we have three rookies in the lineup and it’s always a learning experience.”

Like the Riggers, the Mammoth are 0-1 this young season, succumbing 17-13 to the Washington Stealth.

“Coaches don’t like losing and we’re no different than Curt,” sighed Colorado bench boss Bob Hamley. “We made a lot of mistakes on Saturday, but Washington played well. They deserved to win and we didn’t. We’ve talked already about improving each week and we have to get much better than we were on Saturday.”

“They’re going to come at us with everything,” insisted the ‘Necks’ Shawn Evans. “They’ve lost their first game, too, and they haven’t had much success against us, so they’re going to have that in their heads. We have to be ready and run our game plan.”

Malawsky couldn’t quite put his finger on why Calgary has had slow starts the past few years.

“The first game there’s a lot of distractions,” he explained. “We had three rookies in the lineup, three guys on our offensive side, and everybody understands that offence is the last thing to come around. It takes a while to jell. I think that had a bit of an impact.

“Our mandate this year is to try to use a 23-man roster, to get everybody into every game, so if we drop a couple here and there or we lose a game to learn a lesson along the way … we need to make sure we’re getting better each week and when it’s time to make the big push at the end of the season that we’re right in the mix with everyone else. To say that it was OK, absolutely not, but sometimes it might be good to lose early rather than late.”

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